Juliana Huxtable

Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art

02 May 2025 — 10 August 2025

The Kitchen, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART DETROIT (MOCAD)

CODE SWITCH: DISTRIBUTING BLACKNESS, REPROGRAMMING INTERNET ART

“The need to articulate where exactly the Black avant-garde is propagating is important for Black artists resisting exploitation and de-politicization.” — Anaïs (An) Duplan

Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art is a multi-sited exhibition exploring and redefining the history of “Black data,” centering and celebrating contributions by artists of African descent to the rapidly advancing field of new media art and digital practice. Drawing its title from André L. Brock’s groundbreaking text Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020), this exhibition explores the relationship between Black cultural production and the legacy of computation as a mode of machinic engagement and creative inspiration.

Initiated by The Kitchen, New York City’s center for experimental art and the avant-garde since 1971, the second iteration of Code Switch is presented in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). The exhibition builds on a historic archival timeline of radical visions from Black makers and thinkers and brings together an intergenerational roster of contemporary artists to unpack the correlation between body and machine, informed further by the “age of the internet.” With a wide range of disciplines and materials, these artists instruct toward, and intervene within, an expanded definition of “internet art,” indicating that art produced in an era of accelerated mass communication cannot be set apart from a discourse of cybercultures and technology.

Life mediated by screens has transformed ways of seeing and—central to this—has transformed, mutated, and modified Black cultural production itself. Code Switch is divided into three “domains”: the first is the time period pre-1960, the second is 1960-1990, and the third takes the view of 1990 to present day. The exhibition at MOCAD follows the initial two domains of the project that debuted at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York City last fall (October 15–December 10, 2024). Code Switch surveys how artists and creative technologists rattle the promise of cyberspace as an equitable site of representation and liberation, upending it as an undercurrent and generative force for both inquiry and resistance.

The first of its kind internationally, Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art is a multi-sited exhibition exploring and redefining the history of “Black data,” centering and celebrating contributions by artists of African descent to the rapidly advancing field of new media art and digital practice. Drawing its title from André L. Brock’s groundbreaking text Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020), the exhibition explores the relationship between Black cultural production and the legacy of computation as a mode of machinic engagement and creative inspiration. This exhibition will take on two components—the first part, a historic archival timeline as presented by The Kitchen in collaboration with The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Fall 2024 (October 15–December 19, 2024); the second part, a contemporary group show, to take place Spring 2025 (May 2–August 10, 2025) in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD).

Participating artists:

American Artist, manuel arturo abreu, Minne Atairu, Xenobia Bailey, Neta Bomani, Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley, chukwumaa, Tony Cokes, Shawanda Corbett, Sofía Córdova, Taína Cruz, A.M. Darke, Stephanie Dinkins, L. Franklin Gilliam, Cameron A. Granger, fields harrington, Auriea Harvey, Juliana Huxtable, E. Jane, Devin Kenny, Kalup Linzy, Pope.L, Nandi Loaf, Pastiche Lumumba, Julie Mehretu, Marilyn Nance, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Ayodamola Okunseinde, Sondra Perry, Howardena Pindell, Venusloc (Vanessa Reynolds), Tabita Rezaire, Cameron Rowland, Kahlil Robert Irving, RaFia Santana, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Martine Syms, Wes Taylor, -{ john-henry }-[ thompson ], Muriel Tramis, Jack Whitten, and others to be announced.

Juliana Huxtable

Artist, writer, musician and performer Juliana Huxtable (b. 1987, Bryan-College Station, Texas) excels in probing dormant and marginalized histories, narratives and technologies to challenge discourses around contemporary perceptions of identity, futurity and politics.

Through painting, photography, text and video, she has defined a singular aesthetics of language that often plays into a digital, Tumblr-ised visual identity, a kind of collaged rap and visual rapture. Huxtable’s practice offers a key critical voice on identity, as well as, specifically, her own identity as a black trans woman. Her work comments on different forms of reality through the lens of her personal structural experience. Inseparable from the political, the personal is our opportunity for disobedience, and Huxtable plays with this concept through her ever-evolving portrait of selfhood.

Huxtable is concerned with the way in which marginalised groups are ‘forced to be their own saints’. Hinged on empathy, desire and agile distortion as a political and social paradigm, Huxtable’s motive re-examines our understanding of ‘the image’ and ‘the human’. Her works pool together references from science fiction, queer nightlife, Internet subcultures, folklore, fetishes and Furry fandom, into portrayals of intersectionality and speculative social archetypes as a method of resistance and liberation.

In 2022, Project Native Informant presented AKIMBO SPITTLE. In the exhibition, Huxtable places her own body at the centre of mythologising scenes; the printed and overpainted canvases set against hallucinogenic landscapes render her figures half human, half animal.

Huxtable’s recently opened solo exhibition HEADS & TAILS IN THE STRUGGLE FOR ICONICITY presented the artist with the opportunity to broaden the cast of characters populating the canvases. From the exploration of her own image in the previous show, Huxtable here takes the work a step further; an exercise in world building if you will, resulting in a universe of her own creation.

In 2017, Huxtable published Mucus in My Pineal Gland, a celebrated volume of poems, performance scripts and essays. In the same year, MUMOK and Huxtable published Life: A Novel, a collaborative science-fiction narrative with artist Hannah Black.

Her works and performances have been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Hayward Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Brooklyn Museum, New York; ICA, Boston; MoMA PS1, New York and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, amongst others.

Her work can be found in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem and Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm.

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